1. Field of the Invention
This application relates to systems and methods integrating financial accounts into a personal finance program.
2. Description of the Related Art
A variety of technologies exist for consumers wishing to utilize a central repository to help manage their financial information. For example, Microsoft Money and Intuit Quicken each allow consumers to enter information regarding their financial accounts and track transactions in those financial accounts. Other entities may also provide similar proprietary and/or open source personal finance software. Some personal finance software allows transactions at many financial institutions to be automatically updated via a secure electronic communication between the personal finance software and a data provider of the financial institution. Thus, when the necessary information for the consumer's financial accounts is entered into the personal finance software, the personal finance software may download recent transactions for the financial accounts on a periodic basis, such as each time the consumer accesses the personal finance software and/or requests updated transaction information. Other financial accounts may not have electronic communication capabilities established and, therefore, may require the consumer to manually enter transaction data into the personal finance software.
With account information for multiple financial accounts entered into the personal finance software, the personal finance software can be very useful in tracking transactions, balances, and trends across multiple financial accounts associated with the consumer. However, consumers are opening an increasing quantity of per capita financial accounts, such as credit card, checking, saving, loan, investment, and specialty store credit accounts, to the point that a single consumer, or consumer's family unit, may easily have ten, twenty, or more financial accounts that they wish to track in personal finance software. In order to begin tracking these multiple financial accounts, though, the consumer must first remember all of the accounts that they have opened, and second, must manually provide all of their account information into the personal finance software, such as by locating statements associated with the various accounts and copying account information into the personal finance software. This process of setting up accounts in the consumer's personal finance software can be tedious and may motivate the consumer not to bother tracking their less frequently used financial accounts in the personal finance software. Additionally, the consumer may forget to provide account information for new accounts that have been established after they have already set-up their pre-existing accounts with their personal finance software.